A while back I briefly wrote about using SmartOS and wanting to give it a spin. I ran short on time and excuses to try it, so I put it on the back burner, despite wanting to get into it.
Well, great news! My dad’s server died and a friend’s TrueNAS CORE box needs replacing (it is having problems too, the plugins really do suck at times). With my dad having a timeline to meet to get a server up with a couple VMs, it was a great time to bite the bullet on SmartOS for real. I still have plenty to learn, but I believe now I have a good server ready to go with the 2 VMs he needs.
The Server
It’s just an old beater HP i3 desktop with 2 cores, 4 threads and 6GB RAM, and we stuck in an SSD that we will do a mirrored zpool on later.
I installed SmartOS to a flash drive and set it up. This server only has 2 functions:
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A UISP server - so I pulled down Debian 12 for that
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OpenBSD wireguard VM - so I did the process to install from iso
I’ll write later on what I did to install OpenBSD 7.5.
Ansible
I use Ansible at work and always wanted to get it up for home use. I finally pulled the trigger and have a couple roles and such to manage setting up servers with SSH and adding users. I’ll add more as time goes on, but this is all these two servers need as far as Ansible goes right now.
Everything is running well right now, I am quite pleased with the end result.
Last Steps
I need to get this server out to its destination, finish the UISP setup, connect clients to the VM at its new destination, and then pair up the Ubiquiti devices with the UISP server, and then this should be good to roll for now. There’s lots of changes happening AROUND this server, which I will get to at some point. I will also probably get a DNS server on this too and use a zone-dataset fixed up with that and run unbound on it or something.
This is a good start for me. Next steps will be to move onto the next server and migrate my friend’s Nextcloud to a zone-dataset, and I think he wants an Immich server too, plus some sort of local DNS as well. But yeah, overall quite pleased, more to come as I set these boxes up and go into more detail.
#100DaysToOffload #Post11